Why Roxy Music Abandoned Their 2011 Album

Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera said singer Bryan Ferry was the main reason the band abandoned an album that was to include original member Brian Eno in 2011.

The group has been inactive since then, making it probable that 1982’s Avalon remains Roxy Music's final LP. “There was [an album] that we attempted to do about six or seven years ago,” Manzanera told Billboard in a new interview. “We went into the studio with Brian Eno and with Chris Thomas, our original producer, and we sort of did about 15 or 16 tracks. At that point, Bryan said he couldn’t write lyrics anymore, so we just put out hands up in the air and just said, ‘Ah! Ugh! I’m speechless. Okay … goodbye.’”

Manzanera’s comments come nearly three years after he told Classic Rockthat “we all listened to it and thought, 'We can't do this. It's not going to be any good. Let's just bin it.' And so it's just sitting there on our personal computers. Maybe one day it'll get finished. But there's no point in putting it out if it's not great.”

Roxy Music recently released a deluxe version of their self-titled debut album from 1972, but Manzanera said it was unlikely that the rest of their catalog would be similarly repackaged. “I don't think there will be enough stuff to do that,” he noted. “There really wasn't a lot of extra stuff just lying around. … There might be the possibility of doing it for For Your Pleasure, a different kind of thing, and maybe it would be interesting to do something for Avalon, because there's one or two tracks we didn't put on there that I have. But after that, I don't know."

Still, don't make room on your shelf yet. ”This one took about eight years to get together," Manzanera said. "Quite frankly, I don't think we'll be alive if we keep doing this eight years every go, you know?"